Building Blocks for a Biblical Prayer Life

By now, you're probably used to my theological and social opinions, and how I think about these issues. This week, we are diving into an even more personal level, since the topic is prayer. We're kicking off the month of April, containing Easter (yay!), with the Anglican layperson's take on the theology and experience of individual and corporate prayer. This has been on my mind to start the month, especially because the Lenten sermon series at church is titled "Pray Daily."

What do I mean by prayer?

Very short answer: a conversation with God. This is consistent with Martin Luther (who wrote A Simple Way to Pray), who defined prayer in his Small Catechism as faith's response to God's initiation and love. To expand on this definition, to pray is to speak to God in an attitude of praise, supplication (asking on behalf of ourselves or others), and repentance, as the occasion or portion of the prayer may suggest. Prayer is not merely individual, but also corporate (with a group of fellow believers, whether in a small group, conference, or church service). Prayer is not merely extemporaneous, but also scripted (as in the form of a collect).

In the interest of a broad look at this topic, I would direct you, if you're interested, to some outside sources on what prayer looks like in different faith traditions. Marquette University has a collection of prayers from Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), Buddhism, and Native American traditions. A potentially sketchier website is World Prayers, which collects submissions from laypersons globally. Encyclopedia Britannica, to which I refer frequently, has a nice summary article on prayer in different major traditions worldwide. Finally, at least one ecumenical Muslim has some thoughts on how to participate in interfaith prayer without being relativist. (I'm not sure if that's possible without pluralism, but I did look into tolerant exclusivism in the past and that seemed to be a viable option, at least for interfaith dialogue.)

How did I learn to pray?

For most of my life, I was educated at home, transitioning to public and private university settings. Because most of my childhood was spent at home or in the community, those places were instrumental in my learning about the theory, theology, and practice of prayer.

Parents and Family

It may be helpful to sketch my parents' and siblings' faith background here. On my father's side, Lutheranism was practiced for several generations back in an East Coast setting, influenced by periodic immigration from Germany and (then) Prussia. Teaching and practice of prayer in that blended cultural setting focused on doing the "right" things per Luther's Small Catechism, which was taught to all congregants past a certain age. On my mother's side, the German/Prussian influence was perhaps even stronger, along with exposure to the charismatic renewal (early 1960s and beyond) which spanned multiple Christian denominations. This renewal, contrary to much of the LCMS, was founded on a continuationist perspective on the "charismatic" (or more "expressive") gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as praying or speaking in a language unknown to the speaker. While both sides of my family were at best nominally Christian for the most part, more of her relatives preserved their faith and practice. This imprinted with varying degrees of strength on each of my siblings and me.

What were my takeaways from this childhood environment?

• Base prayer directly on Scripture as much as possible
• Write down prayers in order to remember them later and see how and when God answers (yes, no, or something else)
• Family simultaneous prayer time with 3+ kids is ideal but is impossible to do more than a minute or two per day
• Pray as often and as much as possible, preferably extemporaneously
• Praying in a tongue (glossolalia) is permissible, but only in private or (if in church) inaudibly

Church

My parents took us to a Vineyard church until I was in first grade, at which point we resumed attending a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) church. There, I participated in Sunday school, weekly worship, weekly Bible studies (youth and adult), and confirmation (7th and 8th grades). Major prayer-related takeaways I had from the formal instruction, informal instruction, included these:

• The Lord's Prayer is the most basic structured, scriptural prayer recommended for all ages. It covers all major areas that one would need to talk to God about.
• Luther's Morning and Evening Prayers are also basic and structured, but not in the collect form. If there is only time for one prayer, choose the Lord's Prayer.
• Within the church service (whether Sunday morning, midweek, or other for a feast or festival), the liturgy has no space for corporate/individual extemporaneous prayer.
• Prayer is a comparatively minor part of small groups, any of which (groups) must be pastor-led to avoid the risk of heresy creeping in
• God answering "yes" to a prayer is only by grace (the Lutheran understanding of grace, not the Reformed understanding of grace - here are two posts on differences between Lutheran and Reformed doctrine more comprehensively)

What has influenced my prayer habits over the years?

A key shift in my prayer habit occurred in college, another in young adulthood, and a third more subtle shift occurred within the last few years. It has been a fascinating path for me, to say the least.

Experience of my own prayer

I differentiate this sub-section from the parental/home influence section because external and internalized lessons don't always translate directly into personal behavior, because we have a free will (see Lutheran vs Reformed links above). Let's walk through the most memorable experiences chronologically.

• Primary grades: I kept a prayer journal starting in Sunday school, splitting my prayers roughly equally between thanksgiving and supplication. Here, I had the basic understanding that prayer should be at least daily and spring out of my love for God/my awareness of His love for me.
• Secondary grades: starting in 6th or 7th grade, my prayer was more influenced by reading through the Bible annually, which probably made my prayers more Scripture-based (but still with the primary-grades mindset), especially around when my last set of grandparents died.
• High school: I don't have too many prayer-specific memories here, but was trying to keep a consistent prayer time. I do remember being a spectator on many arguments between a brother and a parent on the "why" of prayer related to the doctrines around free will, predestination, and God's sovereignty. So, perhaps the reasoning behind the doctrine of free will was not taught to all of us as well as the assertions were.
• College: attending an LCMS-affiliated school, I went to student-led evening prayer (by the pre-seminary students in rotation) and experienced my first time praying in a tongue with awareness of the meaning of what my mouth wanted to say. This experience was quite unexpected, given the atmosphere around cessationism, but I accepted it and pondered it for a while.
• Young adulthood: once I was several years into the post-college work world, I kept attending a local LCMS congregation but also went to weeknight prayer groups at an Assembly of God church. AoG is in the Pentecostal/charismatic tradition, so this group heavily emphasized 1:1 meditation on Scripture and promptings of the Holy Spirit, laying on of hands, anointing oil as indicated, and prolonged intercession. I tended to journal my prayers much more extensively during this time.

Experience of others' prayer

Like many Christians, I have been on the receiving or listening end for others' prayer, for me or for others. I have just a few memorable experiences that come to mind in this category, although my journals likely contain others. The most immediate memories come from college and my current position. In early college, I was involved with a Christian student group reaching out to the substantial Muslim student population on campus. The leader prayed with me once, which correlated with my (uncommon for me) experience of being aware of God's presence. In the academic work world, I have been blessed with two department chairs whose simple prayers at the start of each faculty meeting show a deep integration among faith, life, and learning/teaching.

Bear in mind that, although I did select and integrate habits from my experiences in the AoG prayer group, there were many habits and teachings I consciously did not adopt. The subject of sifting doctrine and thinking through the logical consequences of one doctrine or another, or one's worldview, is more thoroughly addressed in Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (which I'm about halfway through!).

Church

From 1st grade through age 21 or so, I was a member of the LCMS congregation my parents still attend. Outside of the childhood formative experiences that were reinforced by liturgy and habit over the years, I would say that there was little to no additional influence from this point that changed my views or habits over the years.

For the next 10-12 years, I was a member of a more local-to-me LCMS congregation that was not quite as high-church conservative in a number of ways. Pertinent differences included (1) in-sermon prayers which had never been a feature of my previous congregation, (2) sermon series and other teaching on the practice of prayer, and (3) allowance for small groups without a pastor present, so long as the leader had been trained with a brief course reinforcing Small Catechism doctrines.

Since 2022, for precisely one liturgical year, Husband, Child, and I have attended (and recently transferred to) a parish in the Anglican Church of North America. Similar to the LCMS, the ACNA is liturgical, using the 3-year lectionary (which in the LCMS is an option alongside the 1-year) and plenty of collects and other scripted prayers. Differently, in the ACNA parish the prayers may be led by a male or female deacon, and there is space in each service for extemporaneous intercessory prayer by congregants. Besides weekly prayers in worship services, individual and family use of the Daily Office is strongly encouraged for continued spiritual nourishment and growth. This uses a different lectionary; here's why there is so much Scripture proportional to the amount of prayer for each day of prayer.

Undergraduate education

At the university I went to, the core undergraduate curriculum included two theology classes; one could choose a more basic level (surveying the Bible and major doctrines of the Christian faith especially Lutheran distinctive) or a more advanced level (Old and New Testament deeper dives). Looking back, I regret not choosing the more advanced pair of classes, but there may have been scheduling difficulties that were more pressing in my choice at the time. There was nothing new to me in the classes I took, but what I had learned previously was reinforced.

Marriage

Although early experiences were quite formative, I identify my marriage as the single factor with the most wide-ranging influence on my prayer life. He was also brought up LCMS, with relatives having wandered around from Church of Christ, through other denominations, eventually to Lutheranism. Additionally, Husband studied enough Greek and theology within the pre-seminary program (from which he eventually switched to majors in philosophy, computer science, and math) that he was thoroughly familiar with Lutheran and other traditions' doctrines on prayer and the philosophical frameworks that guide how various traditions think and have thought about prayer through history.

A particular influence has been his attitude toward reason. As you may have gathered from my references to Noll's book, and past posts, I do not appreciate the anti-intellectualism within much of United States Christianity. However, I also refuse to put reason above Scripture in terms of authority for thought, life, and belief. Properly situated, reason is used to serve our knowledge of God as revealed in Scripture, which was written to audiences in specific historical contexts. While this topic could be the subject of innumerable additional posts, for the topic of prayer it suffices to say that my post-marital understanding of reason's role past and present has changed what I read about prayer and how I react internally to my devotional life in various states.

How have my views on prayer shifted?

I've identified several time points in the previous sections where certain influences not in parallel with my past experience came into play. In synthesis, I can identify two major shifts in my views on prayer: (1) from solely within one's personal devotions and corporate worship services to small-group intercessory and (2) from a "requirement" (not from a justification standpoint but from a feelings standpoint as to the status of the strength of my relationship with God) to a "nutrient" (something to get as often as possible, but it's not deadly to wax and wane).

Let me expand on shift #1. The time point for this change was during my years attending the AoG weeknight prayer group. Before that, I had been a somewhat firm cessationist, in line with the teaching of the LCMS on this topic. During and after, I went farther from that camp because I could see and hear (and evaluate with sound reason) various gifts in action. Currently, I would direct you to theologian Craig Keener's Miracles in the Church Today.

Regarding shift #2, the corresponding philosophical shift was from Pietism (in which background I had grown up) away from this tradition. (Briefly, the Pietist movement started in early Lutheranism, swinging the pendulum away from "dead" orthodoxy of doctrine/theology, thus emphasizing a personal investigation of Scripture, individual prayer, and small groups.) Because a swinging pendulum, given well-timed force, tends to become more and more widely swinging, the focus on personal piety in the movement eventually crowded out the good things of well-thought-out doctrine. 

To expand even more on this point, I see strong parallels between Pietism and evangelical anti-intellectualism (Noll's book). (The New Yorker noticed the anniversary edition of this book in 2021.) A phrase I've encountered as very typical within both movements is "me-and-only-my-Bible." That is, one's personal interpretation of the English translation of Scripture (a "plain text" reading), without any aids based on centuries of biblical scholarship, is taken to be an inspired interpretation, and all scholarship be ignored.

Alisa Childers recently put out a video on the topic of tools to study the Bible, specifically Logos software. The guest referenced a 2009 paper based on an extensive Scripture engagement survey found that Bible reading at least 4 times per week was correlated with decrease in sinful behavior and increase in spiritual fruit. An interesting quote from the unpaginated paper: "Prayer is only predictive of a lower likelihood of getting drunk and having destructive thoughts about oneself and others." Unfortunately, a large majority of comments in the chat replay as well as the post-stream comments were from listeners who were convinced, in a Lockean view, that (1) scholarship was completely unnecessary to a believer's Bible study, and (2) any human scholar's interpretation was bound to risk leading believers astray. One could also draw parallels to the Montanist heresy, but I don't think that 100% of the commenters in question hold that view.

What does my prayer habit look like now?

These days, my prayer habit is pretty quiet, and consistent in the ways that matter to me (but not in the ways that used to matter). Husband and I have tried to do Evening Prayer in the Daily Office most days, usually the long version but lately the short version, which has helped us get continued exposure to the prolonged story of Scripture by daily Psalm(s), an Old Testament, and a New Testament reading. I do keep up the prayer journal, most days, but if a particular petition turns into a multi-day affair (which it often does), I don't feel the need to write something new in the journal each day. Additionally, Child is old enough now to sit when we pray the Lord's Prayer with him before bed, and participate babblingly in church services.

How did your prayer habit develop? How is it different from the previous season in your life?